Few photos from Sydney

Lovely Sydney Habour, wish I could say I get a ferry home each night but I'm not one of the lucky ones!

View of the Sydney skyline (OTEN is Inner West, in Strathfield), as I'm leaving work :)

Challenges, thrills and spills

Challenges we face include dealing with the large volume of students. It is not uncommon to receive 300 emails plus a day, with around 150 phone calls.

Teachers can get "tired" of always saying the same thing, which isn't hard to do when you are dealing with 6,000 students. Supporting the teachers to remain fresh and motivated can be a challenge. I often say we are an "Educational Call Centre", but it is hard for teachers to make that transition.

There are many thrills to be had in online delivery, I love the way things are always changing and ways of improving are always appearing. Reviewing our resources and how they are structured and presented, trying new technology to encourage studentst to interact with each other and engage with their learning, providing our students with links and relationships with our teachers, creating excellent and engaging webseminars and presentations, all are great fun and keep us all excited about our work.

OLS from a student's perspective

The OLS has now become the main tool through which students interact with their studies.

Through the OLS students can:

• Access their learning resources
• Access their assessment tasks
• Submit their assessment tasks
• Track their progress (what units they are enrolled in, how many assignments they have submitted)
• Receive their assignment feedback
• Gain information about their course
• Access taped webseminar sessions
• Access Presenter sessions
• Storify/ facebook/ twitter pages
• Web seminar classroom

OTEN Delivery Platform

OTEN uses the Online Learner Support website to deliver and support our training. Originally this platform was only for support, that is our delivery was done through paper or CD based leraning materials dispatche dto the student, and the OLS was were they were able to join forums and access additional teacher support and resources.

The OLS has greatly grown and been expanded to meet the needs of our fully online delivery. It has two backends, one for teachers where we have a staffroom, access marking guides for units, upload content for our students and take care of other "delivery" tasks.

We have a core group of teachers onsite to assist the students and create resources but due to the high number of students we have a very extensive network of Off Site Teachers who mark students work and visit them on workplacement. These teachers use the OLS to access important documentatio and information about our delivery.

My Section - Children Services

I started in 2003 at OTEN Children Services and we had about 100 students in Certificate III and Diploma.
Since then we have grown to over 6,000 students!

OTEN is open plan, which can be very challenging when we are all on the phone talking to our students

Our section has moved from correspondence paper base, to correspondence CD base, to solely online nowdays. To achieve this we have some very user friendly yet powerful systems.

We use our own Student Management System, aptly named SAM (Student Administration System)

SAM is a massive database which allows us to keep, easily access and update all records of students. We enrol students through SAM, add units, dispatch (when hardcopy resource is required), track all assignment submission and results, but most importantly with the enormous number of students, we are able to track all contact that we have had with the individual student. We couldn't do what we do without SAM!

Late post from OTEN

Hi all

I know this was due a while back, I hope it is not too late and you all enjoying seeing a bit of my world.

What/who is OTEN?

OTEN is the Open Training Education Network, once upon a time an Institute of TAFE NSW, since a restructure in 2003 a college of Western Sydney Institute. OTEN is over 100 years old, and commenced life as a correspondence school to deal with typhoid epidemic in 1910!

This is a History of OTEN booklet that was published to mark our 100 year anniversary.

Sorry, I thought I would be able to hyperlink the image but I can't, so please go to

http://www.oten.tafensw.edu.au/resource/file/2416/history-of-oten-ebook-final.pdf

to read, it is only a short chart of history through the ages, very little reading!

Library

Agneberg s school library is one of the best school libraries in the country. You can search for information in books and databases, loan, or work in the library.